I am contacting you today as a result of information which has been
given to us by a current employee of the USDA. Mr. Richard Botelho Jr.,
who has filed a whistleblower complaint with the U.S. government Office
of Special Council against USDA/APHIS/AC. In his complaint of 1/5/05 Mr.
Botelho makes a substantial number of allegations including: “ . . .
multiple violations of federal regulations and law, gross mismanagement
and waste of funds at Animal Care's eastern regional office in Raleigh,
NC.”

Mr. Botelho’s complaint discusses the non-enforcement of the Animal
Welfare Act several times in his letter:

“Repeat violators of the AWA are seldom given warnings. When legal
action is taken against violators, only a fraction of the proposed fine
is given by a stipulation agreement. The licensee does not have to admit
to the history of repeated violations when they accept a stipulation
agreement. Even when the investigation shows the licensee has repeatedly
violated the AWA, which affected the health and welfare of the animals
and/or public, Animal Care issues a warning or small stipulation.
Facilities often accept these stipulations and continue to violate the
AWA minimum standards and regulations year after year, stating it’s just
the cost of doing business.”

And:

“Inspectors request warning letters and investigations for repeat
violators of the AWA from Animal Care management, only to never receive
such requests and without any reply to the inspector.”

Mr. Botelho makes several allegations regarding the fiscal policies
of the USDA/APHIS/AC Eastern Office as well:

“The OSC complaint states Inspectors are often approved to visit
other cities and states, just to visit relatives or site see, as long as
they conduct inspections in that requested territory. These visits are
paid by Animal Care, the taxpayer’s dollars. In most circumstances the
inspector assigned to that territory has never requested any additional
help from his or her superior.”

“The whistle blower complaint states the eastern regional office of
Animal Care purchases laptop computers, digital cameras, and other
equipment when the current inventory is in excellent working condition.
Unnecessary purchases are made before the end of the fiscal year to
spend what monies are left in Animal Care's budget.”

Other serious allegations are made as well:

“The whistle blower complaint states an inspector alleges that Animal
Care management gave direct orders to an inspector to expunge files
which were FOIA from a federal agency due to an investigation of a human
death at a research facility.”

Mr. Botelho’s complaint might be taken less seriously if it were not
supported by several other sources. During 1995 the USDA Office of the
Inspector General (OIG) performed an audit of the Animal & Plant Health
Inspection Service with regard to enforcement of the animal Welfare act.
The findings of this audit were:

“APHIS does not have the authority, under current legislation, to
effectively enforce the requirements of the Animal Welfare Act. For
Instance, the agency cannot terminate or refuse to renew licenses or
registrations in cases where serious or repeat violations occur (such as
the use of animals in unnecessary experiments, or failure to treat
diseases or wounds). In addition, APHIS cannot assess monetary penalties
for violations unless the violator agrees to pay them, and penalties are
often so low that violators merely regard them as part of the cost of
doing business.”

In 2000 Dr. Isis Johnson-Brown, another former USDA inspector made a
similar statement in a news conference in Oregon regarding the conduct
of the Western Regional Office of USDA/APHIS/AC:

“The research institutions I visited, including the Oregon Primate
Center, were not happy to see me coming once they realized that I was
going to hold them to the law. This reaction I expected. What was
surprising to me was my own supervisors were disappointed and
unsupportive of my efforts to simply enforce the bare minimum standards
in the Code of Federal Regulations. The USDA has a good ol’ boy
relationship with the research industry and the laws are nothing more
than smoke and mirrors. More than once, I was instructed by a supervisor
to make a personal list of violations of the law, cut that list in half,
and then cut that list in half again before writing up my inspection
reports. My willingness to uphold the law during my site visits at the
Primate Center led to me being “retrained” several times by higher-ups
in the USDA.”

My own experiences with the USDA have been similar. SAEN, the
organization which I direct, recently issued a report: Breaking the Law:
Animal Care in U.S. Labs which is available at:
http://www.all-creatures.org/saen/articles-rep-btl.html. Our report
details violations of the Animal Welfare Act by several dozen research
facilities, with one of these labs racking up no less than 51 violations
in a three year period. The enforcement action taken to date by the USDA
has been a fine of less than $10,000. A penalty of this size is
virtually meaningless to this offender, the University of California
(San Francisco) who annually receives an estimated $160,000,000 from the
National Institutes of Health (fiscal 2002) for the performance of
animal research.

The fact is that many nationally-known laboratories violate federal
law regularly with virtually no fear of consequences. Facilities pile up
dozens of violations while the USDA/APHIS/AC does little or nothing.

In some ways this is not surprising, since the USDA apparently cannot
even tell when a laboratory is lying about the number of animals in
their possession. For example: Harvard reported the use of 336 primates
to the USDA in 1998, but reported 1810 primates to the NIH for the same
year. Similar discrepancies have occurred with Yale. Yale’s 1998 animal
use report literally contradicted itself. The front page of Yale’s
annual report to the USDA/APHIS listed experimental use of 32 primates
and another 71 held for conditioning. The report attachments listed
depriving 22 primates of water and depriving another 65 primates of
food. Yale experimented on either 65 or 87 primates. However, a July,
1998 USDA inspection report for Yale facilities listed a total primate
inventory of 198 primates, instead of the 103 Yale had reported.

The bottom line is that the USDA/APHIS/AC seems unconcerned that
registered research facilities have literally lied in reports which they
are required by law to file. Even this should not come as a surprise,
since the USDA/APHIS/AC itself compiled a report for fiscal 2002 which
was filled with errors regarding the number of primates in laboratories.

SAEN has filed repeated complaints with the USDA regarding
laboratories that were clearly in violation of the Animal Welfare Act
with little or no response.

In light of all of this information I strongly urge that you
immediately convene hearings within the House Committee on Agriculture
to investigate the functioning of USDA/APHIS/AC with respect to
enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act, as well as the other issues
raised by Mr. Richard Botelho Jr. and Dr. Isis Johnson-Brown.

I look forward to a reply from your office in the very near future. I
am sure that you see the enforcement of federal regulations and laws as
a major priority and will look into this matter immediately.